


How This Game Ends

by researchboner



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Multi, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-03-26
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:15:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23313742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/researchboner/pseuds/researchboner
Summary: Donning their curly-whirly shoes, the U.N.C.L.E. team heads for Istanbul and into their first organized job, a tangle of politics, gang violence, and black-market dealing that will test their tentative bonds and either bring them together or tear them apart.
Relationships: Illya Kuryakin & Napoleon Solo & Gaby Teller, Illya Kuryakin/Napoleon Solo/Gaby Teller
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	How This Game Ends

Solo can't sleep. He has trouble, on occasion. The job does that to a person. The War did it to plenty of people, but oddly he never had trouble getting to bed after it ended.

Usually, on nights like this, he finds himself a bedmate and works at it until they're both exhausted. Having another living, breathing person close by is....

Well. It doesn't matter. Tonight, every time he closed his eyes he saw those pictures. Nearly a decade of human excruciation rendered into pocket-sized, white-bordered squares, arrayed tidily against a black background. Grayscale horrors - but not for him. He would have been in _color_.

There isn't enough scotch in the world to erase that particular memory. And when his goal is to actually get drunk, he wants other people as far away as possible.

Waverly told them to take the day off and wait for instructions. Solo isn't worried about needing time to recover. And if Waverly cuts their time off short, well. Gabby and Illya can handle it. If Waverly doesn’t like it, he can kick Solo back to the CIA. He doesn’t care.

He doesn’t care.

It's maybe two hours until dawn. The deck that joins his room to Gaby and Illya's faces the Bosphorus, still dark, only starting to gray at the outer edges of the view. He can see much of Istanbul painted in gas and electric lights, the movement of early-morning workers, trash collectors, the dregs of society wandering home. The channel that runs between the European and Asian sides is still a portrait of midnight with its dark water and lit boats. It's peaceful. He enjoys the lie of peace.

Solo raises a toast to the city and tries to take a drink, before realizing his cup is empty. Fortunately, the bottle isn't.

Now he just needs to line the lip of the bottle up with the edge of his glass.

“That is not advisable.” Ah, there he is, fully dressed and looking fresh as a mint, except for those bruises and scratches on his face.

“Morning Peril.” Solo pours a shot of the remaining alcohol into his glass, a small amount spilling on to the table. He makes a soft, annoyed, _tch_ sound, and sets the bottle down hard enough to send out a crack of glass meeting wood. It rings in his ears and down the little alley that backs their hotel.

“How long have you been out here? All night?”

Solo considers lying, but there’s not really a point. He picks up his glass, wobbles slightly, and downs what’s there. “Just having a little tipple before I hit the sack. No need to be motherly.”

Illya sits down opposite Solo at the table, making a noise that’s somewhere between frustration and concern. 

“You can’t be like this. We have work to do.” Irritation, clear in the Russian’s voice. The corner of Solo’s mouth tips up into a smirk. He shouldn’t be pleased that Illya’s angry with him, but the anger is welcome. Someone else’s feelings are more than welcome right now, when he’s been trying to drown his own for hours.

Illya reaches across to pick up the bottle and grunts at its lightness. He sets it down far more carefully than Solo did.

“We don’t even know what that work is yet, Peril.” Solo rolls his glass between the palms of his hands, looking out over the Bosphorus instead of at his new teammate. "'A bit of nastiness' could mean anything from kidnapping to bombs. I am curious, though, why they would send us in a month after an attempted coup."

"You have read the briefing." At least Illya seems a little calmer.

"Of course I have. I'm the CIA's best, remember?"

“We need to be ready for anything.”

“I’ll be ready.” Solo sets the glass down on the table, pointedly gentle this time.

He’ll be ready. Him and his ribs, cracked from muscle contraction. His burned palms and feet, and a collection of small sprains and pulled muscles that were the reward of electrocution. If Waverly had any sense, he would put Solo in the hospital, not out on the front lines. If Solo had any sense, he would allow it. But he and Illya seemed to have made a pact of silence as regards what happened in that basement room. No one else knows. Not Waverly, not Gaby. Anyone else who could spill those beans is dead.

“Cowboy.”

Solo tracks the progress of a boat across the channel.

“Solo, look at me.”

He stays focused on the water. “Don't.”

For a moment, silence. Then Illya sighs. “Very well.”

Strange to think that a couple of weeks ago, they’d been trying to kill each other. Life has a funny way of muddying the waters.

Light footsteps announce Gaby’s approach. Unlike Illya, she’s still in her bedclothes, her hands cupped tight around a cup of coffee. Not Turkish coffee, but plain old Western coffee. This, after all, is a hotel frequented by Americans and Europeans. They expect the comforts of home right along with the exoticism of the Near East. And the hotels are desperate for clientele these days.

“Are any of us going to sleep tonight?” Solo snaps the words out, pushing himself to his feet. The world sloshes around him and starts to tip sideways, but quite suddenly there’s an arm around his waist keeping him upright. Too strong to be Gaby.

Illya settles him back into the chair, and Gaby presses the coffee into Solo’s hands. “Drink it,” she says, merciless. “Slowly.”

Solo almost drops the cup, the heat of porcelain feeling like fire pressed against his palms, but he bears down on the pain and accepts it. It would be a waste to drop it and ruin his pants.

Gaby watches him, her face expressionless, as he starts to sip his way through the coffee. She takes the third seat at the table, taking both Solo's glass and the bottle and pouring herself a drink.

"Excuse me," he says, though there's the barest touch of amusement in it. There's something about Gaby that always seems to lift his spirits, the same way there's something about Illya that demands honesty from him. Not Solo's forte.

Gaby raises her eyebrows at him and takes a long, slow drink. 

"So none of us are going to sleep tonight." Solo leans his head back to rest against the back of the chair, vision swimming from the motion. 

Silence, all around.

Solo tries not to feel comforted. It doesn't work. They'd all had their traumas over the past week. Gaby, finding and losing her father. Being kidnapped and nearly killed by Vinciguerra--who knew what the man planned to do with her if they'd gotten away. Illya, losing probably the one material thing that really mattered to him, and then almost losing Gaby. He'd gotten the luckiest of them, perhaps, but it was a low bar at best.

It's nice to know none of them want to talk about it.

The call to prayer kicks off on the far side of the water, carrying clearly and quickly echoed by the mosques on both sides. Solo isn't sure he would have appreciated the sound if he'd been trying to sleep, but the chorus of voices in the waning darkness is a little something like magic. 

"I've never been to Istanbul before."  Gaby knocks back most of her glass, clears her throat around the burn, and reaches for the bottle again. Illya gently moves it out of reach.

"I get the feeling we'll all be going to exciting new places from now on." Solo sits up, considers going inside--

"Too right." Waverly emerges from Solo's room to join them at the table. Solo still had to marvel at someone so unassuming being the head of their particular allied task force. Most of his handlers couldn't wait to swing their... _power_ around. 

"How'd you get in there?" Solo doesn't like the idea of someone else being able to wander around in his space unchecked, even though in his life that's always a possibility. It's why he doesn't hang on to keepsakes. Illya's an odd duck in that way, but a watch is easier to keep close than most things.

Waverly ignores Solo, tossing one file after another onto the table until he has a stack of six. "Something to entertain yourselves with while I gather our resources. It's time to get to work."


End file.
